Yasin Malik Nepal-bound to meet daughter

Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front chairman Mohammad Yasin Malik has left for Delhi. This time the reason is apolitical. He is travelling to Nepal to meet his 19-month-old daughter Razia Sultana and wife Mushal Malik.

The reason: since controversy of Hafiz Sayeed being seen at a sit-in organised by Yasin Malik in Pakistan to protest hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru, the mother-daughter duo has not been given visa for India.

Yasin will not be able to travel to meet the duo as his passport expired early this year. "The government can say that I am a controversial figure but how can they deny visa to my small daughter, who is yet to see her homeland," he said.

"My daughter's visa application is pending for nine months," he added. According to a statement from JKLF, Yasin had gone to Pakistan to complete travel documents of his family, especially daughter, that were necessary for her travelling to Srinagar in January 2013. "In the meantime, Afzal Guru was hanged on February 9. Malik protested against this tyrannical act of the Indian government and sat on a hunger strike in Islamabad, Pakistan. This annoyed Indian rulers and media who announced a war against Yasin," the JKLF statement claimed.

Yasin will spend some days with his little daughter and family in Nepal when and if he reaches there. Terming Yasin's travel to Nepal for meeting his daughter and family as a human need and compulsion, a JKLF spokesperson said, "Separating an innocent child from her father cannot be termed but as cruelty and undemocratic act of Indian rulers. Barring a little girl from seeing her father is an act that no human society can tolerate. This becomes much more condemnable when decisions like these are taken on political vendetta."